all your suns and stars
It goes like this:
Freyjas refuses the title of King from that slimeball Barows, violently even, in a way that would make his father proud, but is murdered anyways.
(So the messengers tell her. Kyle is a better source of information: Frey's injuries are severe and have put him into a coma—he got them defending the retreat of his allies. Georg and Lyon have, with the assistance of a detective agency, taken him away across the sea to recover, far far away, farther than any Falenian citizen would dare to search for him. Lucretia and Sialeeds went with them. His allies are going to ground. They are waiting. Liberation is suddenly years away.
Lym does not have years.)
They will not give Lym the Sun Rune, she knows. Not while she has any chance of actually receiving it. And it killed her mother, true, it plunged her nation into chaos—but it is her nation, and Gizel has spoken to her in the evenings about the cost of freedom and the physics of sacrifice, coming the more frequently she snaps at him and bares her teeth and screams. He becomes fond of her in his own way, she learns to see. She is not Sialeeds—Gizel's weakness is all too apparent in Lym's eyes, born of Arshtat's subtle steel and Ferid's immense heart as she is—but she is something.
A girl, she thinks. The little sister he could have had were his father not a constipated dolt of a man and his mother gone too soon.
It's too bad for him. She already has a brother.
Princess Lymsleia Falenas, future Queen of Falena, is a pawn.
But Lym, a beloved daughter, will never forget the loss of all that came before—and she especially will not forget that it came about by his hand.
She gives the command for the Queen's Knights to deploy and only waits for Gizel and Marcel, preoccupied by the glory of battle and the practicalities of munitions, to march out of the throne room before she turns to Miakis, whose smile falters.
"Still, Princess?" Miakis asks. She opens her mouth to make another one of those awful jokes.
"I'm young," Lym replies quickly. "I know. I know, Miakis. But I'd sooner see that creep burn than watch him make a mockery of Father's garments a moment longer!"
Miakis is silent for a long moment. Lym stares her down. She has put Miakis through many a childish whim, but this is nothing like that, and they both know it. "It took your mother."
"It took Lordlake first!"
"When did you hear about that?" is her bodyguard's half-hearted response. They both know well enough that Gizel had delighted in informing her about the fine details of the horror wrought upon Lordlake, and that he thinks it amusing on some level is enough to convince Lym that while he might have been for Sialeeds once, he is for no member of the royal family—ever.
Lym rises from her throne. Her mother's sacred headpiece is too heavy for her head. It makes her head ache, but then, her temples have been pounding since that nightmare of a night when her life fell apart. "Come on, Miakis. You and I have a tribute to Frey to create."
If I cannot be better than them, she thinks, then I will become so much worse.
Lym and Miakis catch up to Gizel's entourage as they exit the gates of Sol Falena. She has discarded her mother's formal robes for her old ones, the ones that had just been tailored for her this year, and isn't it funny, how time goes by so quickly? The only thing she's added to it is a lovely pair of riding gloves.
"What's this?" Gizel asks from his mount, curious but unafraid, more amused than anything. Ostensibly he refers to her breaking house arrest, but they both know he really means the headband Lym pilfered from Frey's rooms, left untouched by them all at her demand as a harmless pittance.
(Lym has learned her lessons well. Make yourself a nuisance and you will be underestimated but impetuous—an object blocking progress, a stone in the path that must be stepped around. Resistance that looks useless is altogether too effective, given time.)
Miakis steps up next to her. The two of them have always stood proud together, whatever their differences. "The future Queen would see justice done for her fallen brother—a man who was unfairly smeared and then murdered for it—with her own eyes. She is following an ancient royal ritual of honoring his life and remembering his death by wearing his accessories to the site of battle."
"We do go to avenge my older brother's death, of course," Gizel says, a schemer to the last, his eyes flicking between them as if there's something he's missed but can't quite figure out. "But I was also of the opinion that we were setting out to avenge Queen Arshtat and Commander Ferid, who went before me, as well. This will not be a pretty vengeance, your Majesty, and your eyes are young yet."
"I watched the Sacred Games with my eyes wide open," Lym replies. She will not call him Commander, or husband, or even give him the benefit of a name. He doesn't deserve it. "It is my duty to both watch and lead the men who fight for me in battle. As the future Queen, I will go."
Although he could block her attempt, the men in the ranks look inspired. With Marcel beside him, watching Lym with a speculative glint in his eyes that she does not like, Gizel lets out the barest hint of a sigh and schools his face into a wide smile. "How about that, men? Our Queen is with us, and justice is on our side. May our mercy, as deep as the Feitas, be known throughout the entire world!"
Lym and Miakis take a horse and settle at his side. Under the raucous cheering, Gizel gives her the side-eye.
"I warn you," Miakis says with a smile, her voice entirely devoid of humor. "Touch one hair on the Princess' head and I'll gut you from head to sternum."
"I did not, and never will have, any intention of the sort," Gizel tells her, looking vaguely disgusted and rather queasy at whatever image has popped into his head. He is a horrible man, and Lym wants to beat his face in more than she has ever wanted to before.
Miakis' smile never wavers. "You'll notice that you implied that about yourself, and I said nothing of the sort."
"Enough, Miakis," Lym says, squeezing her bodyguard's hand on the other side of the horse, where Gizel can't see her do it. "I would see justice done as soon as possible, and bickering among allies will not bring that about any quicker. This is for my brother. May the gods above keep his soul and make it well."
Gizel gives her that considering look again, like he's seeing someone else in her.
Lym holds her head up high. The ties of Frey's headbands flap in the wind behind her.
Justice, a voice in her head whispers, sounding like her mother's from so long ago. Justice and judgment. I am the divine. I will do what is right.
No matter the cost.
Lym knows better than to listen.
She listens anyways.
Gizel's army clashes with the combined Barows-Armes forces at high noon on a wide, sunny plain under the bluest sky Lym has ever seen off the water. He insists that she remain in his tent, far away from the front line, and goes into battle leaving Marcel to watch over her.
Lym and Miakis wait. Then she has Miakis stab Marcel in the back of the neck.
"It's time," Lym says, keeping her eyes fixed on her bodyguard's face. "Go underground, Miakis, to the ruins we passed, and stay there for a few days. If the Rune Scholars have the right of it, all that's left on this plain..."
"...will be you," Miakis says, and for the first time in all the years Lym has known her, her face crumples. The only reason she hasn't knocked Lym out and taken her far away from this nightmare is because of the fundamental truth that a bearer of a True Rune will never know peace—Lym would, eventually, be forced to return to Falena, because True Runes have a way of melding fate and destiny like that. "Princess, don't do this."
Lym doesn't look away. "When I'm done, I'll find you."
"You're still a child!"
"And I'm the heir apparent! Do you think I'd be doing this if I had any other choice? I'm not going to sit in that castle and waste away as that hideous man uses me for his own ends! There's no time left!"
"You're too much like Sialeeds for your own good," Miakis says after a tense silence. "That's why Godwin keeps giving you those looks, you know. You're a born politican. The both of you. But this..."
Lym can feel the heady rush of anger in her bones, amplified by the light of the sun and the horrible gurgle Marcel gives at their feet. "At least this way, innocent civilians won't be killed!"
"You'll bring war from Armes, you know."
"I've thought of that possibility. But officially? They're not even supposed to be here. They came on Barows' promises of rulership—when the power of the Rune is displayed, they'll think twice about coming into my Queendom."
Miakis lets out a hiss of breath between her teeth. "Then you'll bring Holy Harmonia down on all our heads! They may just be really getting starded, but they're not an insignificant force to be reckoned with, Lym!"
"We're wasting time," Lym says. "I'm going!"
She runs out of the tent before Miakis can answer her.
Gizel, like she predicted, is in the middle of the battlefield, and he doesn't look surprised to see her. He does lunge for her, tackle her out of the way of an enemy blade—some soldier lost in the haze of battle, somewhere beyond reason. He sits her up and seizes her by the chin as his men provide them cover. "And just what do you think you're doing out here, your Highness?"
"Bringing justice," Lym says through gritted teeth. Just a little longer, now.
"Well! I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that an arbiter of justice has managed to make it all the way into a war zone despite her tender age, should I? If only you would have lived a bit longer, you'd have started to resemble your father more and more, I suspect. Get off the battlefield, brat. You're going to get yourself killed." She had heard that men who went into battle often discarded all pretenses of civility. There's no space for that in that kind of environment, Lym, her father would say, mussing up her hair, but she is beyond fear now, and the power of the sun is coursing in her veins. Gizel sees something in her expression and his twists; he yanks Frey's headband off of her, pulls her bangs away from her forehead, but it bears no markings. "What...?"
Lym laughs and doesn't mind that it hardly sounds anything like her own voice. "This is for my brother, you... you absolute bastard!"
She raises her left hand to the sky and smiles as the sun burns brighter and brighter against her closed eyelids.
Nobody would be proud of her.
But this is still for them.
The plains burn under the scorching rays, and the last thing Lym remembers seeing is Gizel's face, for the first time full of fear.
Lymsleia Falenas wakes up alone under a pale blue sky in a wasteland full of dead things, her heart beating in her ribcage, the Sun Rune on her left hand whispering I am not done with you yet. The desolation extends for miles and miles around, the entire circumference of the battle and then some, and there is a new valley to her west where there had before been a marsh. As she sits up and simply stares for a while, considering this, there is a rush of magic and then of movement, and a robed woman with closed eyes is hovering before her.
"Who are you?" Lym asks, not feeling flustered or angry or much of anything at all.
The robed woman hums. "I am Leknaat," she says. "You have changed your destiny in ways not even I foresaw, but you have a long ways to go from here."